Conception, Strategy, Implementation
In conceiving the idea for our venture, my team stressed the desire to create something that wouldn't require us to be on our feet at all times. Our brainstorming led to the idea for a web-based venture that relied on the needs of two parties and assigned our role to simply act as middlemen. We would later discover that this reliance on both third party buyers and sellers would not lead to much revenue for us. As the one assigned to create the website and thus deal with most of the functionality for the venture, I initially felt that the distribution of work was inequitable. To combat this issue, I avoided creating the website from scratch and instead found a platform, Moonfruit, that allowed for simplicity and easy usage. I was glad that teaching my team members the usage of Moonfruit was not complex and facilitated their contributions to running the website. Despite this, I still felt that the group dynamic weighed heavily on my part. I had connected our email account to Thunderbird, a desktop application that activated pop-ups whenever new emails came through the servers. This allowed me to immediately check and update our website whenever we received submissions from buyers or sellers. Judging from my mentions of certain emails at group meetings and through group emails, it seemed that a few team members seldomly checked the email or helped update our site with information from the email. It seemed that our strategy consisted of only a few steps- creating the website, heavy marketing and then waiting for submissions to come in. For a longer-term project, this simplicity would have worked well, since the legwork was not a significant time-consumer. Unfortunately, this worked against us in the context of the short-term. In hindsight, a more detailed business plan and multiple steps for different situations would have served us well.
Challenges in Implementation
Our main challenge in implementing our venture was simply the number of transactions and our low revenue margins. Taking 5% off of low ticket item products (majority of items were under $50) generated less than a dollar per transaction, and it did not help that we already struggled to increase the number of transactions. I believe that my team should have pivoted during the second challenge, but that we had fallen prey to the sunk cost fallacy (myself included). We had spent all of our start-up capital on upgrading our free website to one with more space as well as our Facebook ad campaign, and it seemed that we were generating a fair amount of buzz. However, we failed to realize that buzz would not translate into a significant increase in transactions, and were excited by (somewhat) useless metrics. We were excited by responses to our quickMVP, a survey that I now believe asked the wrong question. We should not have asked if customers would use our service, but rather how often, since our core issue was the low usage of our service.
To increase the number of transactions, we decided to advertise heavily to our friends and encourage them to submit and purchase items from our venture. This was effective in a sense - half of the group members heavily sourced their friends' help and resulted in quite a few purchases, including high-ticket items that contributed significantly to our retained earnings. Other members did not generate any revenue, and it was unclear if they had put effort into doing so.
We also tried to combat the lack of transactions with a product innovation- providing a negotiations feature on the website. Although we did have negotiations, it seems that the purchases were still mostly spurred by the pressure that team members put on their friends to buy rather than the feature's appeal itself. Looking back at this issue, I believe that we should have brainstormed some kind of incentive for people to use our service. I think that the "unmet need" we attempted to resolve was not nearly serious enough that we would profit off without further incentives, as students in the middle of the semester do not "need" to sell their products at all.
Hypothetical Do-Over
If we were to do over this exercise, I believe that we would have chosen another venture entirely. The timing of our venture did not mesh well with the needs of students - their concerns centered on midterms and studying, and there was no real need to sell their items in the middle of the semester. I believe that a stress-reduction or food-related venture would have performed better, as needs of customers for those two areas are always present at Penn. While we did think that our venture served as a useful resource for students, it was the wrong time and not the correct business for significant short-term profits.
Another aspect that I would have instituted in a do-over may have been a performance tracker. I use a spreadsheet in a club that I run to make sure executive and club members are active, one that measures their activity through a variety of categories. Something similar would have been helpful in this group experience, since I found that several members did significantly less in helping the effort but did not have solid metrics to prove it. Perhaps setting goals such as "5 successful sales" per group member would have put more pressure on every group member to contribute more, or at least for them to gauge their performance compared to others'.
Lessons in Entrepreneurship
At the conclusion of this venture, I have come away with new insights as well as a mixed bag of feelings. I learned that people have to be held accountable, and there should be an established leader of the group. We did not email our presentation in one of the challenges because everyone in the group thought someone else was doing it. We did not spend nearly enough time re-evaluating the potential success of our venture after our launch and the subpar reception. We did not set well-defined goals in regards to overall retained earnings, which would have alerted us to how poorly we were performing throughout the challenge.
As for personal reflections throughout the challenge, I believe that I did not take hold of the reins tightly enough. I think that I should have stepped up to be the leader of the group, since I was already the one in charge of the money, Venmo account, website creation, and Facebook ad creation and campaign manager. My hesitancy to establish authority resulted in disorganization of the group's responsibilities and less efficiency than there would have been under one individual's direction. I enjoy having control, and this quality was demonstrated throughout my hold on essential facets of the venture throughout the challenge. However, I am rather lacking in patience and thus skimmed over the planning aspect of the challenge. If I had emphasized more of a structured plan and timeline for our venture, we could have jumped to implement a different strategy at earlier points in the challenge. I think that I am enthusiastic and ready to do the legwork for future developments, but sometimes I require a push from other team members and hard deadlines to be set first. I also believe that I felt afraid to criticize certain group members because my authority was not clearly defined enough. I hope that my next venture will involve team members that are all passionate enough to put in significant effort.
